Trying to create a sphere in Processing

I'm familiar with old OpenGL but just getting up to speed on shaders. I was writing code in Processing and took a working demo that draws a cylinder and attempted to convert it to draw a sphere.

There are three components to the code. First, there is the processing code, a class called PShape that encapsulates an OpenGL shape. The code for a cylinder uses a single QUAD_STRIP. For a sphere, I didn't come up with one, though it occurs to me that's not a bad approach. So, question 1: Does anyone have code that maps a sphere, not as a grid of quads with a north pole and south pole cap, but some kind of gently curving path that completely covers the sphere? If not, what is the best way? I was originally intending to create bands of quads that cover the majority of the sphere except for the poles, and an endcap at each pole.

When I inadvertently had a single QUAD_STRIP with the ends not connected to each other, I could see the earth, with blue and white noise on top. I realized that my code was doing a band of latitudes, and that the end of each strip was not connected to the next strip. So I tried to create a number of strips. When I do, I get all white.

I realize that this may be something involving processing, but most of the expertise for this is in OpenGL, so I'm asking here about that aspect.

bad sphere:

With current code, no texture shows at all. I have left in the "can" code so you can see the code that worked creating a cylinder.
I will show first the shaders, then the Processing code that calls them. I have not changed the shaders at all.